It’s the latest setback for the company as it pursues a national 4G LTE network.

LightSquared's dream of building a national 4G-LTE network hit another snag, though the company insists its vision is not dead. LightSquared officially filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in New York today. In a statement, CFO Marc Montagner said the move “is intended to give LightSquared sufficient breathing room to continue working through the regulatory process that will allow us to build our 4G wireless network.”

LightSquared gained conditional FCC approval for its network project, using both satellites and cell towers, in January 2011. The FCC reversed course the very next month, indefinitely suspending the company's conditional waiver to operate the network. That decision came in light of a National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) that warned "LightSquared's proposed mobile broadband network will impact GPS services and that there is no practical way to mitigate the potential interference at this time."

In its filing, LightSquared listed $4.48 billion in assets with $2.29 billion in debt as of Feb. 29. LightSquared has been under pressure from its creditors as they continue to ask for Philip Falcone, the company's main backer, to step aside. Falcone's hedge fund (Harbinger Capital Partners) owned about 74 percent of LightSquared at the beginning of the year. Despite today's actions, both Falcone and the current LightSquared management team are staying in place according to a company spokesperson.

I'm just glad they didn't get permission to deploy a nation wide GPS jamming network.

What they need to do is get in line for the spectrum incentive/repack auction for the TV bands that will be coming up in the next year or two. They'll have to pay their fair share (instead of trying to shoehorn in on a cheap spectrum buy like they did); but they'll have an opportunity to bid on prime spectrum for the task.

Having a truly wholesale 4G provider as they've outlined will be A Good Thing(tm).

How can you file for bankruptcy when you have over $2 billion more in assets than debt?

Its a Chapter 11, essentially to reorganize their debt and avoid being sued by everyone they owe money in the meantime, while allowing them to keep running the business.

Lightsquared's assets are likely most of the licenses they've bought up that are basically valueless. They certainly can't sell them for $4b, probably not for enough to cover their debts. It's also very useful for getting out of long term contracts.

What they need to do is get in line for the spectrum incentive/repack auction for the TV bands that will be coming up in the next year or two. They'll have to pay their fair share (instead of trying to shoehorn in on a cheap spectrum buy like they did); but they'll have an opportunity to bid on prime spectrum for the task.

Well, a investment firm loosely related to Charlie Ergen (Dish Network, owners of 40MHz of spectrum they're trying to get reallocated to terrestrial use and 6MHz unpaired in the 700MHz band) has bought up LightSquared debt, and there is also a satellite already in orbit for LS.

What I'm expecting is that if Ergen wants it, they'll use this spectrum for satellite only augmenting the terrestrial holdings. He can push a nationwide LTE footprint with the satellite, and for urban areas, have much faster, non-satellite based speeds - LTE-Adv in a 40MHz+6Mhz channel would provide for around 25-35Mb/s user speeds.

How can you file for bankruptcy when you have over $2 billion more in assets than debt?

Its a Chapter 11, essentially to reorganize their debt and avoid being sued by everyone they owe money in the meantime, while allowing them to keep running the business.

Lightsquared's assets are likely most of the licenses they've bought up that are basically valueless. They certainly can't sell them for $4b, probably not for enough to cover their debts. It's also very useful for getting out of long term contracts.

To add to that, even if we assume the licenses are salable at their asset value, there's the issue of liquidity. Would anyone actually be willing to buy the licenses?

Essentially, the issue is they have a lot of infrastructure, but no cash. As such, they can't pay their interest payments. By filing for chapter 11, they can avoid being taken over or forced to sell infrastructure by their creditors for the time being.

What they need to do is get in line for the spectrum incentive/repack auction for the TV bands that will be coming up in the next year or two. They'll have to pay their fair share (instead of trying to shoehorn in on a cheap spectrum buy like they did); but they'll have an opportunity to bid on prime spectrum for the task.

Well, a investment firm loosely related to Charlie Ergen (Dish Network, owners of 40MHz of spectrum they're trying to get reallocated to terrestrial use and 6MHz unpaired in the 700MHz band) has bought up LightSquared debt, and there is also a satellite already in orbit for LS.

What I'm expecting is that if Ergen wants it, they'll use this spectrum for satellite only augmenting the terrestrial holdings. He can push a nationwide LTE footprint with the satellite, and for urban areas, have much faster, non-satellite based speeds - LTE-Adv in a 40MHz+6Mhz channel would provide for around 25-35Mb/s user speeds.

Well, a investment firm loosely related to Charlie Ergen (Dish Network, owners of 40MHz of spectrum they're trying to get reallocated to terrestrial use and 6MHz unpaired in the 700MHz band) has bought up LightSquared debt, and there is also a satellite already in orbit for LS.

What I'm expecting is that if Ergen wants it, they'll use this spectrum for satellite only augmenting the terrestrial holdings. He can push a nationwide LTE footprint with the satellite, and for urban areas, have much faster, non-satellite based speeds - LTE-Adv in a 40MHz+6Mhz channel would provide for around 25-35Mb/s user speeds.

I'd expect they'll have the same issue converting any other satellite band, perhaps even more so. I would expect the FCC to now be quite gun shy about the issue.

If we accept the values posted here for spectral efficiency, http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/ ... s-effi.php, then a conservative 1.4bph efficiency on a 6Mhz channel still results in 8.4Mbps per channel. Logic would dictate in that situation they would want to own three or four channels per market, which on the surface seems reasonable; but may not be practically possible.

There are certainly huge challenges to surmount to build a nationwide wholesale 4G network; but I maintain that doing so would immensely foster the competition the US mobile telephony industry badly needs.

I'm just glad they didn't get permission to deploy a nation wide GPS jamming network.

I was under the impression that the 'problem at hand' wasn't that Lightsquared's technology wasn't transmitting outside their licensed spectrum, but rather the GPS hardware industry responsible for ground-based hardware (e.g. GPS receivers) were using poor designs and poorly engineered GPS products that listened outside of the GPS licensed spectrum.

I'm just glad they didn't get permission to deploy a nation wide GPS jamming network.

I was under the impression that the 'problem at hand' wasn't that Lightsquared's technology wasn't transmitting outside their licensed spectrum, but rather the GPS hardware industry responsible for ground-based hardware (e.g. GPS receivers) were using poor designs and poorly engineered GPS products that listened outside of the GPS licensed spectrum.

If I am wrong, then so be it. Am I wrong?

As I understand it, you are wrong. LS wanted to output more power than the bands were licensed for to do what they wanted to do. The net effect on GPS receivers would be like trying to hear a whisper from across a large, crowded room where everyone else is shouting.

It isn't the fault of the GPS receiver makers that LS wanted to misuse the spectrum in this way, nor should they have to rework ALL of their devices just to make what LS wanted to do feasible.

I'm just glad they didn't get permission to deploy a nation wide GPS jamming network.

I was under the impression that the 'problem at hand' wasn't that Lightsquared's technology wasn't transmitting outside their licensed spectrum, but rather the GPS hardware industry responsible for ground-based hardware (e.g. GPS receivers) were using poor designs and poorly engineered GPS products that listened outside of the GPS licensed spectrum.

If I am wrong, then so be it. Am I wrong?

You are semi-wrong. Lightsquared was, as I understand, staying in their spectrum, but butting up against the edges that border GPS. They were also trying to blast strong, terrestrial signal immediately next to the extremely weak GPS signals. When you do that, you're going to have some signal bleed over the edges and basically raise the noise floor way over the signal strength of GPS transmissions.

Well, a investment firm loosely related to Charlie Ergen (Dish Network, owners of 40MHz of spectrum they're trying to get reallocated to terrestrial use and 6MHz unpaired in the 700MHz band) has bought up LightSquared debt, and there is also a satellite already in orbit for LS.

What I'm expecting is that if Ergen wants it, they'll use this spectrum for satellite only augmenting the terrestrial holdings. He can push a nationwide LTE footprint with the satellite, and for urban areas, have much faster, non-satellite based speeds - LTE-Adv in a 40MHz+6Mhz channel would provide for around 25-35Mb/s user speeds.

I'd expect they'll have the same issue converting any other satellite band, perhaps even more so. I would expect the FCC to now be quite gun shy about the issue.

The FCC is currently going through the process right now (should be done by the fall) of coming up with rules on how companies can convert satellite based spectrum to terrestrial usage. Its expected that Dish's holdings will be permitted in this document.

Ergen and Dish were very smart as to which spectrum they bought. They picked satellite frequencies that were adjacent to terrestrial uses. Their 2000-2020MHz band is adjacent to PCS Broadband spectrum (1850-2000MHz) and TV relay services (2020-2025MHz), and their 2180-2200MHz band is adjacent to current military use and future AWS spectrum (2155-2180) and NASA telemetry (2200-2290MHz).

BarkingGhostAR wrote:

If I am wrong, then so be it. Am I wrong?

Yup. The issue is that to build a filter that would filter out the LS terrestrial transmissions would be expensive and it still wouldn't be that effective - the filter can only roll off so much. To get into the details it helps if you have an electrical engineering background.

I'm just glad they didn't get permission to deploy a nation wide GPS jamming network.

I was under the impression that the 'problem at hand' wasn't that Lightsquared's technology wasn't transmitting outside their licensed spectrum, but rather the GPS hardware industry responsible for ground-based hardware (e.g. GPS receivers) were using poor designs and poorly engineered GPS products that listened outside of the GPS licensed spectrum.

If I am wrong, then so be it. Am I wrong?

Speaking as an RF Transmissions Systems (3D1X3; originally Ground Radio Maintenance, 2E1X3) troop in the US Air Force (read: this shit is my job), the problem can't be laid at the feet of GPS.

Lightsquared bought a piece of bandwidth allocated for satelite downlink use (high transmit power, originating from a satelite in space, insanely low received signal strength on the ground; not authorized to transmit from the ground at those power levels, if at all), and then tried to get authorization to use that same band, at high power, transmitting from ground stations. They were given a conditional waiver for testing (at lower than their ultimate planned transmit power levels), the condition being that they not interfere with GPS. They did interfere (at lower power levels than they really want to use in the end), and so the waiver was pulled. They knew all ofthis when they went into it.

The issue is that of selectivity vs sensitivity. The two are, by their very nature, inversely related. The more selective a receiver is, the less sensitive it can be (will only detect the desired signal or closer to it, but can't detect weak signals). The more sensitive it is, the less selective it can be (can detect weaker signals, but picks up more adjacent signals). The problem here is that GPS receivers are designed to pick up an extremely weak signal (we're talking microvolts), which means it _can't_ be very selective without massive filters (I believe one of the filters in the research in this case had the filter being the size of an old CRT monitor; care to squeeze that into my father's GPS that's half the size of the original iPod?). Lightsquared wants to blast a signal multiple orders of magnitude greater in strength than GPS, effectively drowning out GPS and other weaker signals in adjacent bands.

This is the same reason that there are transmit power regulations in the first place, particularly in radio (as in the one in your car) as transmitting higher will interfere with the users in the adjacent bands, as the blocks have been spaced with certain assumptions about transmit power and received signal strength.

Physics was always against lightsquared, they pushed and with political support got their conditional, temporary waiver anyway. Physics came back and bit them, and now they're crying foul.

GPS has no obligation to do anything, they're using the band properly, not interfering with their neighbors, and have devices designed to deal with what's SUPPOSED to go in the adjacent bands. The burden is on Lightsquared, the one trying to MISuse the band in question, not on GPS.

PSThe new site layout still sucks, make the fucking comment link send me to the forums like it's supposed to, like I have in my settings, and like I pay you a subscription for.

It's not really a question of physics vs. politics, because it's clearly both. The physics of operating a high-power terrestrial RF service in spectrum adjacent to a satellite RF service is not practical, but the regulatory allocation of terrestrial RF spectrum is obviously distorted by political considerations.

This outcome is the result of the extreme expense and scarcity of terrestrial spectrum available for license by modern digital network providers, while legacy analog services with atrocious spectral efficiency commandeer a ridiculous amount of spectrum.

It's not really a question of physics vs. politics, because it's clearly both. The physics of operating a high-power terrestrial RF service in spectrum adjacent to a satellite RF service is not practical, but the regulatory allocation of terrestrial RF spectrum is obviously distorted by political considerations.

This outcome is the result of the extreme expense and scarcity of terrestrial spectrum available for license by modern digital network providers, while legacy analog services with atrocious spectral efficiency commandeer a ridiculous amount of spectrum.

I think you're conflating two separate issues here. Lightsquared may have made their decisions based on the result of politics (the scarcity and inefficiency you mention on the terestrial bands) and price (less usefulness and versatility in satelite downlink bands, resulting in significantly lower cost for spectrum licensing), but their actual problem is pure physics. Now they're attempting to use politics to combat physics, and if they win, we all lose, since it won't change the physics and the associated, realistically insurmountable, interference issue that those physics say must exist in their desired use-case.

The concept of nationwide wholesale 4G is not dead. Dish is going to be offering it, Clear already offers it for the most part, and Verizon is permitting third parties to use thier network as well(which, btw, is amazingly fast). Lightsquared, however, is dead in their current implementation and thats not a bad thing considering what they tried to pull here. Had they won I can't even imagine the mess our spectrum would have become as other players would have tried similiar tactics....